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World Liberty Financial Has Borrowed Millions Against Its Own Token

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WLFI Recent Borrows on Dolomite

The DeFi project’s treasury used 3 billion WLFI tokens as collateral on Dolomite to borrow $75 million in stablecoins over the past week.

World Liberty Financial, the DeFi venture affiliated with the Trump family, leveraged its treasury to borrow roughly $75 million in stablecoins from Dolomite, the lending protocol co-founded by WLFI’s chief technology officer, Corey Caplan.

On-chain data shows WLFI’s official treasury multisig routed approximately 3 billion WLFI tokens through an intermediary wallet over the past week before depositing the full amount into Dolomite as collateral. The treasury wallet previously deposited roughly 2 billion WLFI directly into Dolomite. The collateral positions are currently valued at roughly $460 million as of April 9, per Dolomite’s stats page.

WLFI Recent Borrows on Dolomite
WLFI Recent Borrows on Dolomite

In the new wallet, the team borrowed 65.4 million USD1 and 10.3 million USDC, roughly $75.7 million in total, although $15 million was repaid on April 7, according to on-chain data.

World Liberty Financial launched World Liberty Markets in January, in partnership with Dolomite, offering lending and borrowing services for its USD1 stablecoin. The arrangement effectively means WLFI built its flagship DeFi product on infrastructure created by one of its own executives, and then used its treasury to become the dominant borrower on that same platform.

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WLFI collateral now accounts for more than half of Dolomite’s deposits. The dynamic has drawn comparisons to some of DeFi’s most cautionary episodes involving founders leveraging their own governance tokens.

In June 2024, Curve Finance founder Michael Egorov was forced into roughly $80 million in CRV liquidations after borrowing nearly $100 million in stablecoins across multiple lending protocols using CRV as collateral. At the time, onlookers argued that Egorov had effectively cashed out without selling, extracting $100 million in stablecoins from a $140 million CRV position.

The playbook echoes an even earlier precedent. In January 2022, Wonderland co-founders Daniele Sestagalli and 0xSifu suffered cascading liquidations after leveraging their staked TIME tokens as collateral on Abracadabra, a lending protocol within their own Frog Nation ecosystem. The founders’ oversized positions cratered TIME from $800 to $360 in hours, triggering a vicious cycle in which liquidated collateral was sold into an already weak market, fueling further margin calls.

DeFi analyst Ethan described WLFI’s maneuver as a similar mechanism to extract liquidity without directly selling tokens, while Ignas warned that the WLFI-backed borrowing may ultimately prove unrepayable.

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WLFI Slides to All-Time Low

The WLFI token briefly fell nearly 10% on April 9, hitting $0.0885, its lowest level since trading began in September 2025, according toCoingecko.

WLFI Chart
WLFI Chart

The thin market depth compounds the risk: if an actor were to aggressively short WLFI, the resulting price drop could trigger a liquidation cascade that Dolomite cannot absorb, since there is no clean path to liquidating billions of illiquid governance tokens.

USD1 is backed by U.S. Treasuries and cash equivalents, limiting the risk of a full depeg. But with USD1’s circulating supply now exceeding $4 billion, the fallout from a Dolomite crisis could extend well beyond the WLFI token itself.

The episode arrives alongside a separate controversy. An investigation by The Times found that WLFI had integrated USD1 with AB DAO, a Southeast Asian blockchain project that had been promoting a resort linked to Cambodia’s Prince Group, whose founder Chen Zhi was sanctioned by U.S. and U.K. authorities in November over alleged involvement in large-scale online fraud. WLFI said it was unaware of AB DAO’s prior ties.

World Liberty Financial has not issued a public statement addressing the recent borrowing, and Dolomite did not immediately respond to The Defiant’s request for comment.

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This article was written with the assistance of AI workflows. All our stories are curated, edited and fact-checked by a human.

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Claude Managed launches in public beta

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Claude Managed launches in public beta

AI agents built on Anthropic’s Claude now have a hosted production infrastructure behind them, as the company launched Claude Managed Agents in public beta on April 8, handling the sandboxing, state management, credential handling, and error recovery that previously took engineering teams three to six months to build before writing a single line of agent logic.

Summary

  • Claude Managed Agents is available now on the Claude Platform at $0.08 per runtime hour plus standard Claude model usage costs; an agent running around the clock costs approximately $58 per month in runtime before token costs, and the service runs exclusively on Anthropic’s infrastructure
  • Early adopters already in production include Notion, which delegates coding, slides, and spreadsheet tasks to Claude in parallel across dozens of simultaneous sessions; Rakuten, which deployed specialist agents across product, sales, marketing, finance, and HR, each live in under a week; and Asana, whose CTO says the company shipped advanced features “dramatically faster” than prior methods allowed
  • Two features are in research preview: the ability for agents to create additional sub-agents for complex tasks, and an automatic prompt quality enhancement that improved structured file generation success rates by up to 10 points in internal testing

Anthropic’s @claudeai account announced the launch on April 8 at 5:14 PM ET, drawing 5.09 million views. The service is built around what Anthropic calls a brain versus hands design philosophy: Claude itself is the reasoning layer, while each session runs in a disposable, isolated Linux container that handles code execution, file manipulation, and tool calls. When the next Claude model ships, the infrastructure does not need to be rebuilt. The brain upgrades and the hands remain the same.

Pricing is usage based. The $0.08 per runtime hour applies to the session; standard Claude token pricing applies to model usage on top of that.

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The deployment patterns across Notion, Asana, and Rakuten illustrate three distinct enterprise use cases. Notion integrated Claude directly into workspaces, allowing engineers to ship code and knowledge workers to generate presentations and websites without leaving the platform, running dozens of parallel tasks while teams collaborate on outputs simultaneously. Asana built what they call AI Teammates, agents embedded in project management workflows that pick up assigned tasks, draft deliverables, and hand back outputs for human review. Rakuten stood up agents across five business functions, each plugged into Slack and Teams, accepting task assignments and returning structured deliverables, with each function live in under a week. Sentry took a different path, pairing its existing debugging agent with a Claude-powered counterpart that writes patches and opens pull requests autonomously from a flagged bug to a completed pull request with no human intervention.

What Developers Need to Know Before Building

Developers define the agent by specifying the model, system prompt, tools, MCP server connections, and guardrails, then configure a cloud environment with pre-installed packages and network access rules. Anthropic’s infrastructure handles tool orchestration, context management, checkpointing, and crash recovery. Sessions persist through disconnections, a practical requirement for complex workflows. The one significant constraint is that the service runs only on Anthropic’s infrastructure and is not currently available through Amazon Bedrock or Google Vertex AI, which matters for organizations with multi-cloud strategies.

Why This Launch Matters for the Broader AI Market

As crypto.news has reported, the AI integration driving enterprise decisions in 2026 increasingly determines headcount, and the operational overhead that Claude Managed Agents eliminates has been a significant barrier to adoption for teams without specialist DevOps resources. As crypto.news has noted, the AI infrastructure buildout, of which Anthropic’s agent platform is a direct example, is one of the primary drivers of capital allocation decisions that have ripple effects across crypto-adjacent AI token markets. The multi-agent coordination feature, which allows agents to spawn sub-agents for complex tasks, is in research preview, with early access available through the Claude Platform console.

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TON’s Catchain 2.0 Delivers Sub-Second Finality, Shortening Latency

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Crypto Breaking News

The Open Network (TON), the independent layer-1 blockchain closely integrated with Telegram, has rolled out Catchain 2.0, dramatically shortening block times to 400 milliseconds. The upgrade is designed to push settlement speeds toward real-time for both payments and trades, while enabling decentralized applications to run with performance closer to traditional apps.

According to TON’s announcement, payment transactions now settle in about one second, and trades settle in near real time. The upgrade strengthens TON’s position as a platform aiming to blend messaging with on-chain functionality, a path already underscored by its ongoing Telegram integration. The update comes alongside an inflationary shift in TON’s token economics: annual inflation is projected to rise six-fold, to roughly 3.6% from about 0.6%, driven by the increased rate of block production.

“More blocks mean more validator rewards, which create stronger staking incentives and bring more TON into the network,” TON stated in its release. The Catchain 2.0 upgrade builds on TON’s Catchain consensus architecture, a BFT-style algorithm first proposed in 2020, and brings near-instant settlement to a network already embedded in an app ecosystem with approximately 1 billion users globally.

Market data captures a snapshot of how the upgrade is being received. TON was trading up about 2.3% to roughly $1.28 on Thursday, with volume around $130 million and a market capitalization near $3.17 billion, according to CoinMarketCap. Observers noted a surge in activity on TON’s network following the upgrade, including spikes in transactions per second tracked by TON Explorer, underscoring the immediate demand for faster settlement and more responsive smart-contract activity.

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The announcement frames Catchain 2.0 as a natural evolution of TON’s thrust to merge everyday communications with on-chain finance, a vision that has been reinforced by Telegram’s growing crypto toolkit. In February, Telegram added self-custodial vaults to its in-app wallet, enabling users to earn yield on Bitcoin, USDT and ETH. Earlier this month, the wallet extended into perpetual futures trading, launching a new feature set in collaboration with the perpetual DEX Lighter. The integration enables TON-based payments and on-chain interactions directly within Telegram’s user interface, broadening the potential scale of user adoption and on-chain activity.

Key takeaways

  • Block time slashed to 400 milliseconds. Catchain 2.0 delivers substantially faster block finality, aiming to improve throughput and responsiveness for both financial transactions and developer applications.
  • Settlement accelerates to near real-time. Payments settle in about one second; trades settle in real time, enabling a smoother user experience for rapid on-chain exchanges.
  • Inflation expected to rise to 3.6%. The increase from roughly 0.6% reflects higher block production and the ongoing minting/burning dynamics within TON’s ecosystem.
  • Stronger staking incentives. More blocks translate into more validator rewards, reinforcing incentives to run validators and participate in securing the network.

Catchain 2.0: what changes and why it matters

At the core of the upgrade is TON’s Catchain consensus algorithm, a mechanism designed to achieve Byzantine fault tolerance while maintaining speed and finality. By accelerating block production, Catchain 2.0 effectively raises throughput across the network, which has several practical implications for users and developers. First, faster blocks reduce the latency between submitting a transaction and its confirmation, a critical factor for payment rails and decentralized finance (DeFi) applications that rely on quick settlement to minimize front-running and slippage. Second, the higher block rate inflates the expected rewards for validators, potentially strengthening the security of the network through deeper staking participation and a larger base of committed validators.

The inflationary shift, while potentially dilutive in the short term, is positioned by TON as a byproduct of increased activity and network security. The organization argues that the higher issuance supports a more robust staking economy, which can, in turn, bolster long-run network reliability and validator health as adoption grows. Investors and builders should weigh the inflationary impact against the benefits of faster settlement and a more responsive ecosystem, particularly as TON deepens its ties with Telegram’s user base and integrated financial features.

Telegram: turning messaging into a multi-asset financial channel

The upgrade arrives amid a broader narrative: TON’s alignment with Telegram is not merely cosmetic. The Telegram integration is positioned to enable users to send TON-enabled crypto payments within chats, bridging everyday communication and on-chain activity. The platform’s wallet features have evolved to offer in-app yield opportunities across major assets, including BTC, USDT, and ETH, and the ecosystem already supports perpetual futures trading through Lighter within the Telegram app. This progression points to a broader strategy of embedding crypto functionality into a widely used messaging interface, lowering the friction for mainstream users to engage with digital assets and on-chain commerce.

Pavel Durov, co-founder of Telegram, has highlighted how real-world restrictions and VPN workarounds in certain jurisdictions—such as Iran and Russia—have driven users to seek more resilient, open channels for communication. The TON-Telegram integration exemplifies a complementary model: users can exchange value alongside messages, with the possibility of automated payments and more sophisticated DeFi interactions embedded into the chat experience. For builders, this signals a shift toward app-layer ecosystems where identity, messaging, and asset transfer are increasingly interwoven.

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Market response and next steps for TON

From a market perspective, TON’s price and on-chain activity suggest cautious enthusiasm for Catchain 2.0. The token’s modest near-term gain aligns with a broader pattern of traders evaluating how faster settlement and higher block production could influence user uptake, validator participation, and overall network throughput. The surge in on-chain activity reported by TON Explorer after the upgrade offers a tangible signal that developers and users are experimenting with new throughput capabilities and real-time interactions across the TON ecosystem.

Beyond immediate price moves, the key questions for investors and developers center on the durability of the new throughput gains, the sustainability of the higher inflation regime, and the extent to which Telegram’s in-app crypto features catalyze meaningful, recurring usage. Will higher staking rewards translate into deeper validator participation, and how will that impact network security and governance over time? How quickly will the on-chain experiences inside Telegram translate into real-world transaction volumes, merchant integrations, or consumer wallets?

Analysts will also be watching how Catchain 2.0 scales with continued ecosystem support. The near-term trajectory will depend on the balance between attracting new users through Telegram’s reach and maintaining robust validator participation to preserve the benefits of faster finality. In the meantime, developers can start leveraging the improved throughput to experiment with more sophisticated DeFi primitives, cross-chain liquidity, and real-time settlement use cases that were previously limited by latency.

What remains uncertain and what to watch next

While the upgrade delivers clear technical and user-facing benefits, several uncertainties deserve attention. The sustainability of the 3.6% inflation target hinges on adoption rates and the ongoing cycle of block production. The pace at which Telegram-integrated features translate into measurable user engagement and on-chain value remains to be seen, as does how regulatory developments may shape in-app crypto features and wallet services. Market participants will want to monitor validator health, network security metrics, and any changes in staking participation as Catchain 2.0 matures.

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In sum, TON’s Catchain 2.0 represents a meaningful step toward faster, more interactive on-chain experiences embedded in a widely used messaging platform. For traders and developers, it signals a broader opportunity: a more responsive, scalable environment for payments, DeFi, and user-centric apps that live at the intersection of daily communication and digital assets. As TON continues to evolve its ecosystem—balancing security, inflation dynamics, and user adoption—the coming quarters will reveal how deeply this integration can redefine mainstream crypto usage.

Readers should watch for updates on validator participation, new application experiments on TON’s mainnet, and any material shifts in on-chain activity as Telegram-enabled features gain traction in real-world usage.

Risk & affiliate notice: Crypto assets are volatile and capital is at risk. This article may contain affiliate links. Read full disclosure

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Pyth Network Launches Data Marketplace For Price Feeds Across Asset Classes

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Data

Pyth Network, a blockchain data oracle provider, is launching a platform for financial institutions to publish and monetize their market data across blockchain networks. 

The Pyth Data Marketplace will initially support datasets for spot foreign currency exchange markets (FX), precious metals and crude oil swaps, while allowing publishers to retain “full control” over the data they share, according to Thursday’s announcement.

Seven new institutional data providers will publish price feeds on the marketplace at launch, the announcement said.

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Pyth’s price feeds span equities, commodities, precious metals and FX. Source: Pyth Network

These include stock exchange Euronext, data provider Exchange Data International, asset manager Fidelity Investments, financial exchange OTC Markets Group, Singapore Exchange FX and the Tradeweb trading platform. 

The announcement reflects how blockchain technology can democratize access to financial data, which has traditionally been controlled by a handful of service providers who charge exorbitant fees for high-quality market pricing data.

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Related: Polymarket expands into equities and commodities with Pyth price feeds

Pyth to enable customers to “pull” data rather than traditional “push”

Pyth’s data pull model allows customers to pay for market data on demand, instead of traditional push-based oracle models that force users to pay for entire datasets, which they may or may not need.

This reduces the cost for the end user, according to Michael James, the head of institutional business development at Douro Labs, the main developer behind the Pyth Network.

Traditional service providers monopolize the $50 billion financial data industry, James told Cointelegraph at Consensus 2025. That is now being challenged by new emerging blockchain alternatives like Pyth and Chainlink.

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“These data vendors have no competition in traditional finance, and so they have all the pricing power in the world,” he said.

Banks, hedge funds, trading firms and other financial institutions are forced to buy this financial data for “compliance” reasons, James added. 

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The market share of different blockchain oracle providers. Source: DeFiLlama

In August 2025, the US Department of Commerce selected Pyth and blockchain oracle provider Chainlink to publish economic data onchain.

Pyth was initially selected to publish quarterly gross domestic product (GDP) data, including five years of historical GDP figures, according to a previous announcement from the oracle provider.

However, Pyth anticipates adding support for more government economic data sets in the future. 

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